1968 Chevy Camaro - Hollow Point

Being In The Right Place At The Right Time.

The Setup: You're in your mid-thirties. You're unencumbered by a family and all the attendant expense. Despite your relatively young age, you are the sales manager for one of the world's premiere aftermarket wheel companies. That's circumstance. What isn't readily apparent is that you're infected and your bloodstream has carried that nasty hot-car spirochete for many years now-lifelong, you could say.

2/13

The Drill: Who knows how this stuff really happens? Perhaps it's just a fortuitous combination of ingenuity, desire, and ultimately, your wallet. Your budget won't allow anything extraordinary, but you are patient and your thinking skews somewhat conservative. So you look for a "finished" piece, something that can be driven "as is" until the madness begins, the demarcation point for a vehicle that becomes inoperable because then it's just chaff, pieces lying at your feet on the cold garage floor.

During that hiatus, you summon the will to continue and you can see the proverbial shining at the end of the tunnel. Meanwhile, your friends buoy you and help you with your project at every opportunity. Will Anthis is lucky like that. He got his psychic props and encouragement that drove him to the end.

Therefore, it was very important to choose the guinea pig wisely. Will had help. He ran the scenes over and over in his head until they compelled him, drove him. "Ever since I saw the movie Better Off Dead, I have been fascinated with the black first-gen Camaro. My pal Dean bought a '67 that the owner sold because he needed the money. As soon as that happened I knew I had to have one."

3/13

Will was rippling, ready to tangle with his first muscle car. He looked in all the usual places. In a local trader rag, he found a postage stamp-sized image of a black Camaro with white stripes: "The cam-phone pic didn't give much to go on," he said. "And the ad was poorly written, but I was intrigued nonetheless. I remember thinking that all I needed was a car with good paint and I could do the rest. Being black, the body would have to be absolutely straight." Will felt somewhat blessed when he discovered that Rob (the owner) turned out to be a body and paint man. "I'd rate it 9.5 out of 10 points," the body man said. Will decided he'd have to see this car and make his own confirmation.

Six hours later, he and Dean arrived on the scene. "Be ready to hop back in if this car is a heap," quipped Will. At the same time that Rob fired the car in his garage, the door magically opened revealing a flawless black bullet. The story is age-old. Rob didn't want to sell but he had no choice. Domesticity called. He had to shift gears. Once in the house, Will met a soon-to-be-mommy and checked out the half-assembled crib next to the bonus pile of parts Rob had talked about. Will was in the right place at the right time. "I could see that it was hard decision for him," he said.

4/13

The Parts: The car he brought back home had that glistening cover but the underside was a little skuzzy, the interior was missing some important appointments (headliner and panels) and the engine wasn't the prettiest girl at the dance either. But Will had his foundation before him and got down to cases - literally. Since racing wasn't in the plan and over-the-road driving was, the 427 has plenty of beans to keep him interested. This wasn't no suicide squeeze here. Though Will didn't elaborate, this character sounds like an iron-head L72 minimally rated at 425/425. Along the way, someone had affixed a Torker intake manifold and 750cfm Holley combined with a strong flame MSD 6AL box. Headers with 2-inch primaries send the extraction through a 3-inch system plumbed with very rude Flowmasters.

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